Legos

We’ve all seen, and certainly stepped on, those famous sharp cornered LEGO blocks. But where did they come from, and what can you make with them? Let’s test your brain, with some LEGO trivia.

1. True or False:The first plastic inter-locking brick was made in Denmark. The answer is False according to http://www.hilarypagetoys.com, where you can learn the about an English toy inventer named Hillary Page who designed a self locking brick (right) nine years earlier than the first LEGO.

2. Are LEGOs based on the English or Metric system? According to http://bit.ly/11VmmBP the Danish version is based on the metric system. Hillary Page’s design was English based.

3. What does the word “lego” mean? At Neatorama.com http://bit.ly/10IsKde you learn that “lego” is made from two Danish words leg (play) and godt (well). If you take the first two letters from each world, you have lego, a word that is nearly always spelled in capital letters. Interestingly the Latin translation means “I put together”.

4. What is the biggest thing ever made with LEGOs? At www.geeknaut.com http://bit.ly/10wEHZp you can see a 102 foot tower made of 500,000 LEGOs. You can also see a LEGO printer, a full sized car and an iPhone.

5. LEGOs are made of plastic. But what kind of plastic? At 3D Printing for Beginners http://bit.ly/10wUa6T you can learn that LEGOs are made of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene or ABS for short. It is a material that is strong and resilient but it is not biodegradable.

6. How many LEGOs are there? At http://natgeotv.com.au/tv/megafactories/lego-facts.aspx you can learn that about 400 billion LEGO blocks have been produced since 1949, about 1140 per second. If all the LEGO bricks were to be divided equally among a world population of six billion, each person would have 62.

7. How Strong are LEGOs? Said another way, if you stacked LEGOs on top of one another, how tall could you make the stack before the LEGO on the bottom crumbles? According to a study reported in the BBC http://bbc.in/12lpWFU the tower would have to be 375,000 bricks to cause the bottom brick to collapse, which represents a stack 11,781 ft tall. The Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall. That’s 9.4 Empire State Buildings!

8. What is the most expensive lego? At CNET http://cnet.co/YISl so you can see a photo of a single LEGO brick worth $14,500 dollars, up for auction at www.brickenvy.com. It’s made of solid gold, and was given to a valuable employee who obviously thought that $14,500 would be better.

APPLICATIONS

1. Make a LEGO Maze for your car. Make sure you include turns and dead ends.

2. Make a lego photo frame.

Remember to make a pyramid shaped holder using Lego blocks on the back so your frame stand up, and use colors to compliment your photo. You can glue your LEGOs together with plastic cement (commonly called model glue). According to, http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Immortalize_Your_Lego_Creations, Crazy glue works well.